Do I have to watch another Depp pirate movie?

“Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides – review

Philip French

The Observer, Sunday 22 May 2011

Back in 2003, I thought Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl the best, indeed the only successful thing of its kind since the Burt Lancaster swashbuckler The Crimson Pirate a half-century earlier. The two laboured sequels, subtitled Dead Man's Chest and At World's End, took the franchise steadily downhill, a process only slightly halted by this new one. A poorly scripted film has its forked tongue sticking out of both cheeks. It features the series regulars, Johnny Depp's crafty old salt Captain Jack Sparrow and his arch rival, Geoffrey Rush's peg-legged Captain Hector Barbossa, and the two are joined by newcomers lady pirate Angelica (Penélope Cruz) and evil Captain Blackbeard (Ian McShane). They're all competing to discover the lost Fountain of Eternal Youth somewhere on the Spanish Main, and for this they first need to find a map, two silver chalices and a mermaid's tear. The search begins in London and takes the cut-throat bands from one violent incident to another without providing any coherent narrative to link them.

Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides 3D

Production year: 2011

Country: USA

Cert (UK): 12A

Runtime: 136 mins

Directors: Rob Marshall

Cast: Geoffrey Rush, Ian McShane, Johnny Depp, Penelope Cruz, Richard Griffiths, Stephen Graham

More on this film

When you can hear it through the thick accents and dialects, the arch dialogue recalls Tony Hancock's impersonation of Robert Newton's Long John Silver. There's a missionary aboard, which leads to jokes about the missionary position, and Sparrow explains to Angelica that he had ravished her as a nun because he mistook her Spanish convent for a brothel.Keith Richards and Judi Dench make brief guest appearances. Richards is there because his accent, body language and ravaged features inspired Depp's Sparrow. Dench plays an aristocratic lady who loses an earring to the fugitive Sparrow as, in the film's best sequence, he scampers through her carriage while being pursued across London by redcoats. The 3D makes every scene darker rather than more dramatic or lifelike. Still, I'm sure it will prove popular, and a shot that follows the endless final credits is virtually a trailer for a fifth film, presumably to be called Pirates of the Caribbean: Plumbing New Depps.”